Hamburg fined by FPPC for faulty campaign finance reporting

The California Fair Political Practices Commission on Thursday fined Mendocino County 5th District Supervisor Dan Hamburg $9,500 for incorrectly reporting his campaign finances during the Nov. 2, 2010 election in which he won his seat, including a charge that he didn't report more than $5,000 of contributions.

According to an FPPC report, Hamburg's campaign committee failed to report about $5,000 in cash contributions and more than $100 in non-cash contributions over six campaign finance reporting periods leading up to the June 2010 primary and the November election.

Hamburg and his campaign also understated and overstated his campaign's cash balance for those reporting periods, ending in Dec. 2009 and in March, May, June, September and October of 2010. The discrepancies included differences that ranged from $1,458 less than the actual balance to $10,316 more than the actual balance.

"This action resulted from complaints filed in the fall of 2010 by a retired judge who is a friend of Wendy Roberts," Hamburg wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Journal, responding to the FPPC press release. "They went through our campaign reports with a fine-tooth comb (as is their right) in an attempt to disrupt our campaign."

Roberts and Hamburg were the top two vote-getters in the 2010 primary and went on to compete for the 5th District seat in November. Hamburg won with 57.44 percent of the vote.

"It's my belief that the vast majority of these complaints are frivolous, mostly pertaining to in-kind' donations made in support of campaign fundraising events," Hamburg wrote. "My opponent held almost no such events so didn't have that exposure. There was also some misreporting on my campaign that was totally unintentional but nonetheless out of compliance."

Roberts said Thursday that her supporters during the campaign "who were tired of being challenged as being pro-development" brought the errors to her attention. She in turn brought the matter to retired court of appeals judge William Masterson, who "agreed it was a significant issue" and filed the complaint.

"It was certainly not a witch hunt," Roberts said. "We felt they were hiding money and not disclosing where they were getting it, or where they were spending it."

She admits not having large fundraisers, and says that type of event can bring in a lot of contributions that aren't attributed.

"Those big events are very good at hiding where your money comes from," Roberts said, adding that she isn't accusing Hamburg of holding fundraisers intending to hide his campaign money.

According to the FPPC report, "for the contributions that were reported, respondents failed to disclose complete contributor information including the street address, occupation and/or employer for contributions received totaling approximately $12,226."

In addition, Hamburg and his campaign reported expenses "made to the candidate, respondent Hamburg, when in fact, vendors were being paid for goods or services," the FPPC report says. Those expenses added up to more than $18,000, according to the FPPC, and no vendor information was disclosed for the expenses.

The FPPC also found that Hamburg charged $16,276 of his campaign expenses -- 23 percent of the total expenses -- to his personal credit card or through his personal bank account, and that the campaign committee reported them as expenses directly to Hamburg with outstanding loans owed to him. The funds should have been counted as contributions and deposited in a campaign committee bank account before the money was spent, the FPPC says.

Further, election law prohibits candidates and their committees from contributing $100 or more in cash or money orders. The FPPC found that Hamburg made two money-order contributions totaling $1,500. Each contribution was more than $100, meaning it should not have been made in cash "or by any other method that was not drawn from the account of the donor that did not provide the name of the donor and the name of the payee," according to the FPPC statement.

Hamburg, his campaign committee and finance manager were fined $8,000, and Hamburg was fined $1,500 for the violations. Hamburg stipulated to the charges and, according to his Thursday response, has paid the fine.

The FPPC meets monthly, and issued a press release regarding its regular meeting Thursday, during which the commission made a total of 25 enforcement decisions. The determination in Hamburg's case was one of 11 such decisions that fell into the category of campaign reporting violations, making it the most populated category for that meeting. The fines in that category ranged from $200 on the low end to $50,000 on the high end, and averaged $9,372.

Other violation categories addressed in the FPPC's Thursday meeting included conflict of interest, independent expenditure coordination, lobbying reporting, statement of economic interests and a subcatetory of that for receiving a gift over an annual limit. Fines in those categories -- for which there were a total of 14 violations -- ranged from $200 to $6,500 and averaged $1,807.

Tiffany Revelle can be reached at udjtr@ukiahdj.com, on Twitter @TiffanyRevelle or at 468-3523.